Certain electronic products, such as smartphones and laptops, are highly sensitive to impact shocks and thus must be protected during shipment with cushioning materials. Traditional materials, such Styrofoam, are environmentally unfriendly. U.S. Pat. No. 6,520,337, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference, describes a unitary product cushioning pack for a shock sensitive product, which is made of a thermoformed plastics material that is capable of providing impact shock protection in three mutually perpendicular directions. The thermoformed plastics material typically has an initial thickness between 0.050 and 0.1 inches. This cushioning pack has a cushioning structure that bounds an article-receiving region for accommodating the article to be protected. The article-receiving region is sized to make a snug fit with the article so as to prevent movement transit. This works well for articles of the same size, such as newly manufactured laptops being shipped for sale.
It is however not only new products that need to be shipped. Consumers often need to return used articles, for example to a repair facility, or to have replacement batteries installed. In this case the articles may have different sizes. For example, different generations of iPhones come in different sizes. While shock sensitive packaging can be customized for a particular manufacture manufacturing a large number of products of the same size, it is not practical to offer a wide range of packaging options to the consumer, who merely has a one-off shipment.